With most of our industry cooped up at home in quarantine, it feels like we are all hearing about video games every single day. If you’re working from home with kids, you’ve probably heard them talk about a sweet new Minecraft build, the new League of Legends meta (still hoping for AP Blitz to be a real thing one day), or some co-worker to co-worker smack talk about 3v3 gunfight in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (looking at you Todd Heberlein). While traditional entertainment experiences are closed down, online eSports tournaments are exploding in popularity.
Call of Duty has gone so far as to add drop in tournaments every five minutes and organizations like Nerd St Gamers have moved their traditional in person tournaments to an online structure. As game studios, tournament organizers, and fans alike shift their habits, so too should our industry. As such my wonderful team here at Almo, organized yet another webinar via our partners at rAVe and Panasonic. If you missed last week’s webinar and couldn’t make it onto our second showing this week, check out the VOD here! Angie Greene (Almo business development manager), Gary Kayye (Director at THE rAVe Agency), and Stephen Milley discuss the market.
One of the biggest pieces of eSports news, coming in the wake of COVID-19, is a surprise to many and a pleasant reminder of what those “in the know” have seen coming for years. NASCAR announced a shift from physical in person races, to an all-digital eSports model. That’s right you read that correctly, NASCAR is still running races and was ready to switch their model in the blink of an eye. For traditional NASCAR fans this is an unexpected respite from the doom and gloom being pumped into their daily lives. For those of us keyed into gaming, we’ve heard stories of Gran Turismo and Forza (Playstation and Microsoft’s flagship driving simulators) drivers being given “IRL” (in real life) racing careers for years.
But it isn’t just NASCAR that is crossing into the eSports world, the NFL, FIFA, and NBA are all leveraging their relationships with EA and 2K Games to continue providing their fans with unique and engaging cross overs with their eSports league counterparts. As we have discussed in prior webinars and blog posts, this cross pollination is not unique to the COVID-19 crisis but a larger trend that these organizations are using to mitigate the financial pain of our current pandemic-centric lives. COVID is by no means the main driver of this cross pollination, think of it as additional fuel added to the fire.
The takeaway from this story for me is that there are already audiences ripe for changing their viewing patterns. It isn’t just hardcore gamers that are primed and ready to accept modernized variations of traditional entertainment. Kids watch high definition beautiful animation from Pixar and Disney, while dad may be watching the next box office CGI-fueled Marvel film. In today’s day and age, everyone is comfortable engaging with digital media.
Not that long ago it was passé for adults to love superheroes, yet today Marvel tops box office numbers again and again. It may seem niche or not be your particular taste (to each their own) but it isn’t going to just be Call of Duty and Overwatch succeeding. This seems to be even more true as my generation comes into being parents. Part of why we love watching the NFL is that we live vicariously through superhuman athletes. When people my age start having kids, and stop having as much time to play games, eSports will fill that spot for a huge number of people.
You don’t have to love first person shooters and MOBAs to engage in eSports! Keep an eye out for our next esports webinar where we will dive deeper on hardware!
Us millennials sure love to ruin
everything, don’t we? First we came in with participation trophies, we moved on
to tank the economy, and now we have come for sports!
*Queue diabolical laughter*
According to this Reuter’s
article, global esports revenues will rise above one billion dollars by the
end of 2019. Yes, that’s a billion with a “B” and that represents an annual
increase of 27 percent. While it still may not be advisable to raise your
children to be an esports athlete; the industry is growing at an exceptional
rate. As it turns out, fun has turned into serious business.
Similarly to millions of other kids
growing up, I would come home from school sit down and turn on my Xbox to play
Halo 2. In my early teens, I would stay up all night playing competitive online
tournaments on the weekends and during summers. The advent of online gaming in
the late 90s and early 2000s exposed millions of people just like me to
competitive gaming. I remember being ecstatic in a car ride home having won a
full year of Xbox live at a local game store. As a pre-teen saving $60 was
enough to make me feel like the greatest player of all time. Meanwhile, this
year in July a sixteen year old made
over $3 million winning an online tournament for the smash hit Fortnite.
There seems to be a rather noticeable generational divide when it comes to esports. The majority of US viewership ranges between the ages of 18 and 34. Just like when my grandparents told me that the iPhone would never take off because “who needs a camera in their pocket?” this trend is not necessarily intuitive but inevitable. Just as civilizations have moved away from blood sports like the Mesoamerican ball game, or the roman gladiatorial events, people are moving away more and more from what we see as traditional sports.
But why would anyone want to watch other people play video games? This question is echoed across the internet in message boards and on popular television shows. Just as a fifteen-year-old may not understand the nuances of play calling in an NFL game, my dad certainly has no clue about the nuances of sideboarding in a competitive Magic the Gathering (or MTG) event. My true esports love is watching competitive MTG because I can watch and see how the pros navigate complex game states. It is akin to getting free advice on how to improve your swing from Tiger Woods when you sit down and watch Luis Scott Vargas play matches on Twitch. Critically, esports has two advantages that traditional sports will never be able to touch—evolution and variety.
Every year Activision releases a new Call of Duty, Epic Games constantly introduces new weapons and cosmetics into Fortnite, Wizards of the Coast add new cards to MTG, Blizzard adds new characters to Overwatch, and Valve introduces new heroes into Dota 2. In order to keep gamers invested in their games, these companies constantly pump out updates to their game that introduce new cosmetic and gameplay experiences. If you are a consumer, you can simply watch the pros play the new content to verify if it looks like something you are interested in.
But variety is the spice of life. When our marketing team approached me, my brain immediately went to a few specific places. My instant reaction was to talk about firstpersonshooters and collectiblecard games. While many friends of mine jump to talk about real time strategy games, sports games, fighting games, and mobas (multiplayer online battle arenas). You will never catch me watching the DOTA International, but I anticipate watching MPL Weekly. And that is the piece of the puzzle that is missing in the minds of people that are not already invested in the esports ecosystem. Regardless of the kind of “gamer” you are, there is an esports league with compelling content for you.
At the end of the day, regardless of whatever preconceived notions that you have about esports; you would be wise to not ignore this industry. Parents in the 80s that bought Atari and Nintendo for their kids probably never dreamed that the gaming industry would grow to a multi-billion-dollar global industry. Don’t be caught behind the curve thinking that esports will never be as big as traditional sports.
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